Tag Archives: talents

Your brand makes you stand out from the crowd like a tall building. It helps you get the job that you love, it helps you attract people who want to buy what you have to offer.

When people know what your strengths are and what you are confident about, they give you their projects, as you will do a better job than someone who is not known for being great at it. I encourage you to take time and build your brand if you have not done so yet.

Discover what is already out there – you already have a brand, people talk about you, its normal. Identify your talents and values and what you enjoy doing. Think about your experience where you have been great at something . And build your unique selling proposition to market yourself. There will be other tactics that you will need to do, but this is a good starting point.

Motivation is something external to the person. It’s done to them. And it’s too difficult a job for you as a leader to constantly motivate your people. Inspire them instead. It’s much easier and enjoyable for you and more energizing for your people.

How to inspire instead of motivate? Here are the top 3 steps to inspire:

Find out what are their talents and strengths

Discover their highest values

Help them to achieve their aspirations – their STARs

Talents and Strengths

The magic is knowing your people’s talents – knowing what they are great at and helping them to apply the things they love doing. This makes them enjoy what they do and feel happy about it. When people know and are confident about their key talents and apply them in what they do and want to achieve, it enhances their success opportunity extraordinarily. It brings confidence, impact and focus to deliver with excellence.

Why would you as a leader in business want to spend time and effort to motivate someone to do things that they are not inspired about and will not feel passionate about doing? Instead give them the opportunity to do the job they are excited and inspired about. It takes less effort for you to place people in roles that they are inspired and talented to contribute and excel, rather than to keep motivating people to do a job they dislike in a culture they can not shine in.

Highest Values

If you are clear on what are your values and choose your job, role, relationships in accordance to them, you generate energy.

If among my strong values are independence and creativity, but I choose the job where I have to strictly follow the rules, like risk manager or underwriter, then I will not be happy about the content of my role as I will constantly have to do something that does not naturally resonate with my core being. The set of values that each individual has is unique to them.

Highest value – you are spontaneously inspired to do the job that resonates to your highest value. You get up and do it, You do not need a motivation to do it. Napoleon Hill called it, chief aim. It is a burning desire to fulfil. Doing the job that fulfils your highest value is one of the secrets to master your life. It’s intrinsic.

Lowest value – you need a motivation to do the job that is in congruence with your lowest values. You find it difficult and de-energizing. You do not enjoy doing a job that relates to your lowest values. Therefore you need an external stimulus to motivate you to complete that job.

It is more difficult than doing the job that you are naturally inspired by . And for leaders it takes much more effort, time and energy to motivate people to do the job that they do not feel naturally inspired to do. It is much more rewarding to inspire people to excel in their jobs that they enjoy doing and that are contributing to their highest values.

Inspiration is calling from within, building on intrinsic values and talents. Motivation is pushing from outside to do something that your person does not enjoy.

Help to reach their STARs

Nobody goes to work for the sake of the company. People go to work to fulfil their highest values, aspirations, to reach their stars – whatever stars mean for each and every individual. If they see how their job, vision, mission of company helps to fulfil their highest value, they are inspired to contribute and to be effective to deliver. If not – they have low productivity and need to be constantly motivated. If their job fulfils their highest value, they can not wait to get to work each and every day and add value to the company. They feel ownership, responsibility, commitment. They are engaged and constantly improve their customer service to deliver upon their personal excellence.

Your wisdom as a leader is to place people in the right role that will help them to reach their stars and add massive value to the company. The role that they feel inspired about, so you do not need to put an extra effort to motivate them. Instead – inspire your people by giving them projects and opportunities that play to their strengths , talents and values.

Your wisdom is to fill your day with high priority things where you add value. If you do not fill up your day with high priority actions that inspire you, it will be automatically filled with low value distractions projected by other people that are low according to their values.

Ask yourself on a daily basis what the highest priority actions I can do today that generates most income, inspiration etc. Rest – delegate to somebody else. How do you live an inspired life if you keep doing desperate things? There is always somebody that matches the job you need to delegate. Make sure its congruent with their values, so you do not need to micromanage and motivate them. Inspire them instead!

Decide to succeed and use the tools and strategies that will help you! The Success Planner contains impactful tools and valuable strategies to help you have more clarity on what you want to achieve, to live with passion, to achieve your goals and to reach ultimate success.

It will help you to:

discover your talents to achieve success more easily

define your passion, mission, vision and purpose to live a more fulfilling life

unlock what success means for you

connect better with your true you and gain extraordinary confidence

focus on your true goals and success, achieving them instantly

get hugely energized, inspired and empowered while traveling on your success mindset development journey

You can start setting your goals at the beginning of a new calendar year, on your birthday, on the day you make an important decision or at any other time of the year. It really does not matter when you start – the sooner, the better though.

The Success Planner is a fabulous present for anyone whom you care about or for whom you wish all the best.

What makes it from being just fine to having a brilliant leadership? I have done much research and this is what I have discovered: Having a personal brand is a leadership requirement now. It helps you to be a better and more authentic leader. It also enhances your executive presence and impact.

Leaders who develop their leadership brand step out of the sea of sameneness and make a much more meaningful impact on their teams by inspiring and empowering them. For what? For being excited to deliver on strategy, to collaborate, to do their best to WOW the customer. Personal leadership branding has become more important than company and corporate branding.

Why? Because we trust people more than companies. And people are more accountable than companies. When you have an issue with a company product or service, whom do you call? The Company? Is the Company picking up the phone? No, you call a professional who sold you the product or service or who is there to help solve your problem. Great Leaders inspire and empower their people to be their best. And overall, leaders, by their leadership brand influence the brand of the company – the experience that people have dealing with the company.

As a leader you are selling your strategy, your vision and why people should follow you to your team and employees. Your personal leadership brand message makes an impact in people’s hearts and minds to engage and convince them, to feel valued and excited to contribute their best.

We know the saying that “people join companies and leave leaders”. Yet, we spend little time developing leadership brand.

What is a personal leadership brand? As Glenn Llopis, leadership branding expert defines it, “A personal brand is the total experience of someone having a relationship with who you are and what you represent as an individual, as a leader”. Think about what that means to you. And don’t confuse this with just acting the part. On the contrary, you should be more of who you are naturally and bring up your best in leadership.

VALUES. What are 3 core values that are truly important to you in the way you do things?

PASSION. What are you excited, energized and passionate about in your leadership agenda?

VISION. What is your aspiration in the leadership journey?

Based on a survey conducted by Glenn Llopis Group, less than 15% of people have truly defined their personal brand and less than 5% are living it consistently. Why? It can be extremely challenging and it requires a tremendous amount of time and effort invested in developing self-awareness, being focussed, executing actions and being accountable for the impact and the result.

The image of your brand is a perception held in someone else’s mind. Successful Personal branding entails managing this perception effectively. As well as managing and influencing how others perceive you and think of you.

It is important to bear in mind though, that the purpose of leadership branding is not self-promotion, it’s rather a commitment to advance yourself as a leader by serving and inspiring others. This will enhance your leadership impact naturally and extraordinarily.

Why passion matters, you might ask. As passion comes from believing you are extraordinarily great at something, being passionate is a sincere way of saying, “by the way, I’m awesome”. All of our emotions exist for good reason. We feel hunger to ensure we don’t starve. We feel full to ensure we don’t burst. And we feel passion to ensure we concentrate our efforts on things that energize and reward us the most.

Your passion will persuade people to listen to you and follow you. It will persuade people to believe in you. But most importantly, passion will persuade YOU! Passion is an emotion specifically intended to make you go mad and work your behind off at something because your brain believes it is highly valuable and could rock your world. Believe me, that is a feeling worth fighting for.

What we’re passionate about is too important to leave to the mercy of fate. If you haven’t found your passion yet, try to create new things, to lead new trends, and to fuse new combinations. But don’t ever stop looking. In my new book called “The Success Planner” I have collated the questions to help you think through and travel on a journey of discovering your passion if you have not yet done so. It is best to start with unlocking your talents, followed by finding your passion and values.

Make your passion your fuel, not your final destination. Whatever you do, be true to yourself and what is meaningful for you. As an example, using the passion discovery tool that I have described in “The Success Planner”, I have discovered that my passion is helping people to succeed. I gain huge energy, inspiration and satisfaction while noticing how my coaching clients become more inspired, focused, self-aware and successful.

Since my early childhood I have loved observing people and thinking about what they could have done differently to be more engaging or more successful in their relationships. Since I have discovered and now am clear of what I am passionate about in my life, which is – inspiring people, developing their success mindset and empowering people to focus on their passion to succeed in life and business, I am finding more and more opportunities in both everyday life and corporate work to focus on this area. This is highly rewarding and gratifying for me. And this is why passion really matters!

In the recently attended seminar: “The 7 Keys To Unleashing Your Genius” I had a pleasure to experience live personal branding and differentiation in seminar facilitation that I have not yet seen before. The facilitator was building his personal brand on conflict. Starting with the introduction and opening messages in the seminar and following it through with personal life examples of both older or more recent disagreement and argument situations. It’ s a really different way of branding yourself as facilitator which I admit, have never seen before in my long facilitator and development events attender career.

The key takeaways of that workshop facilitation from facilitator’s personal branding perspective:

1. You get what you give

Its about positioning the audience at the very start of the presentation. If the facilitator says – “I expect you to be sceptical and to not accept what I am saying”, then he is most probably going to get it from the audience. The underlying message might have been – “Do not just take my words, try and test it out yourself”, and that said would be a better positioned opening to manage the scepticism in the room. But as the facilitator was building his brand on conflict with the audience, the intro positioning did it’s job.

Later in the seminar he experienced it himself as a play back in the exercise on the stage. He invited a lady from the audience to participate in a simple mind positioning exercise, and she made it difficult for him on the stage by being openly sceptical.

2. Brand on your talents

I think the facilitator has had personal branding coaching sessions with a good coach to develop his facilitation style. It was the purpose of the facilitator to be in a conflict with the audience in this event, as by character I could see he can easy get into arguments with people. So he was congruent with his nature and building his brand on his true talent. I think his sarcasm and scepticism might be well received in the British audience. My observation is that British people enjoy edgy humour. So he has well tailored his personal brand for the potential audience. The only thing – in London one should expect different nationalities in the audience with different expectations and appreciation to presentation style, so one may want to tailor their style accordingly.

3. Humour adds the value

Humour definitely helps to keep the audience awake on Saturday morning and get the insights through fun. The facilitator was an analytical sarcastic introvert himself, usually these kind of people pick up really good insights for an edgy humour. Adding the edgy humour to his evoking conflict facilitation style gave an opportunity to ease some conflict situations. Although, as seen, when not managed well, this edgy humour can facilitate further conflict opportunities.

As said in my previous blog post, there were quite a few good insights to take away from this weekend event. I took a learning for mindset development, coaching practice development and also learning of a different facilitation style. I love attending this kind of events for some inspiration and ideas, but also for constantly developing and enhancing my facilitation style.

In a sunny Saturday morning instead of sleeping in or going for Christmas shopping, I decided to attend a developmental event, the seminar on shaping the mindset to focus on what matters in your life and how to more efficiently achieve the desired outcomes. The title of the seminar was a little bit over promising: “The 7 Keys To Unleashing Your Genius”, but as in an any seminar, there were some valuable takeaway insights that I want to share with you. They are facilitating to shape the mindset on how to get from dreams to successful and real outcomes. Here are my 5 key insights:

1. Tension is energy. We need to use the tension to get to the desired results. Geniuses use tension to achieve the incredible. The outcome depends on your motivation and how do you channel it to use the tension. Use it to apply your talents and to live your passion! We are where we are today because that is the level of tension we can deal with. Your ability to be with tension determines your level of mastery. Tension is energy, and energy is a vibration. To be the best you can be, you shall constantly work on increasing your energy levels, your vibration.

2. Cause and Effect law. You are 100% responsible for every outcome in your life. Or in another words said by Tony Robbins: “It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.” Even if you are a victim in certain situation or you constantly get the second best recognition, not the first – that is caused by your thoughts, assumptions, beliefs that you have created in different events of your life journey. If you want to have a different outcome, you have to change the cause of your outcomes – your thoughts, assumptions, believes. A good coach can help with that.

3. Your focus creates your reality. You are always 100% focused, but the question is – on what? A person will definitely achieve what he or she is focused on, it will happen sooner or later – depending of the strength of focus and cause/effect law. That is proven. Therefore be conscious what you are focusing on most of your time. Are they the right things that you want the result in? Do you need to remind yourself to change your focus? How do you choose where to focus on?

4. Perception creates the physical impact. When you meet a person first time, your perception about them creates your behaviour towards them that causes their reaction to your perception and behaviour. We did a little exercise in the room – imagining the person in front of us being either a good, bad, trustworthy, genius, loser, friendly, smart etc person. Every time when we changed the perception of the other person, our body language changed and the impact on the other person changed as well. The good news are – you can influence that by conscious choice of perception. You are creating perception in your life and you make decisions based on your created perception. You can influence your perception that will lead to desired events or outcomes.

5. Discover your True Talents and create natural success by focusing on your True Vision. When you follow your purpose, what’ s true vision for you, the doors will open for opportunities and even such doors will open that you did not know that they exist. If you do not know what to do, just stand it, do not take action until your intuition will tell you which way to go. Intuition can tell it, when you have discovered your true talents that you can use and you have your true vision to focus on. Then intuition will help to generate natural success for you. All what you want to achieve or get is already out there for you. As A. Einstein has said, everything already exists on a certain frequency. You must increase your frequency, vibration levels to meet the level of frequency where your desired outcomes exist.

I’m sure you have already heard of the above in one way or another. It just sometimes helps to look at the things from different perspective and discover new angles that can inspire to focus on your passion and true vision. And to get from the dreams to reality.